A pickup is a transducer that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments, and converts them to an electrical signal. The electrical signal is in turn amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a speaker. Pickup assemblies enable quiet or relatively quiet instruments such as the electric guitar, electric bass guitar, Chapman Stick or electric violin to be audible when played with other louder musical instruments or to larger audiences. Existing pickup assemblies are primarily of three types, namely body pickups, accelerometer pickups and string pickups.
For example, with reference to an electric guitar, body pickups may be directly attached to an inside part of a top of the electric guitar, and behind a bridge of the electric guitar. The body pickups are typically made of a piezoelectric sensor material such as piezoelectric crystal or film or from electret film material. The accelerometer pickups are typically mounted to measure the movement of a top or body of an instrument, which directly correlates to the sound of the instrument. The string pickups typically detect vibrations from the strings. Most electric guitars and electric bass guitars use magnetic pickups.
Magnetic pickups convert vibrations of guitar strings through electromagnetic induction into electrical signals, which may be amplified or modified so as to provide desired volume and/or sound effects. Traditional magnetic pickups typically detect vibrations or movements of strings in an electromagnetic field to induce electrical current in a coil. The traditional single coil magnetic pickups are prone to capture noise from electromagnetic fields due to mains electricity, wiring, power transformers, fluorescent light ballasts etc. in the vicinity and produce electrical interference. This in turn creates noise disturbances in the sound when amplified.
Therefore, in light of the foregoing discussion, there exists a need to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks in existing pickups due to electrical interference that causes undesirable noise.